I have missed you, my blog-reading peeps, missed writing and musing about all the latest doings in politics and pop culture.
During my blogging absence, we've seen the beginning of the stellar second season of
Homeland in all of its outstandingly taut dramatic glory.
The Good Wife has been continuing to kick some serious behind with a fierce Alicia Florrick. Kelsey Grammer scared the heck out of me with his lethally volcanic depiction of a win-at-any-cost Chicago mayor on the second season of
Boss. And the sinister writers for NBC's
Parenthood have been conspiring with the folks at Kleenex to make me cry every week, whether it was with tear-drenched scenes of a kid leaving her parents to attend college across the country, or giving cancer to a women who has a baby, an autistic middle schooler and that college kid on the other coast.
On the silver screen, I've been jonesing to see
Argo,
The Master and
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but, alas, I have been about as successful getting to the movie theaters as I have been at blogging here in the last few weeks.
Meanwhile, all the presidential debates have passed us by including the one where a
dour President Obama looked like someone had just spoiled the next episode of
Homeland for him, the one with Governor Romney agreeing with nearly everything the president said on foreign policy and
CNN's Candy Crowley having to argue semantics with the candidates when the candidates weren't busy giving off a weird,
Fight Club vibe. During the
second banana debate, Vice President Biden looked like the wise yet pompous uncle at Thanksgiving dinner telling the upstart nephew what's what. And then there were those
binders full of women. Oy.
On the home front, the U.S. Senate race between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren feels like a dismal snarl-fest. And, as much as I'm a politics nerd who DVRs debates, this is particular race has completely worn me out. No mas, por favor.
So where, pray tell,
have I been, other than Tweeting up a storm on
Twitter?
I've become a full-time assistant professor teaching writing and journalism at a local institution of higher learning. In short order, I needed to craft not just a syllabus for a writing course (I teach three sections of this course for roughly 60 students), but am creating a new course about online and social media. In addition to teaching/grading and researching/designing a course, I've been helping to advise the staff of the student newspaper two nights a week.
The other big thing that has left me with raccoon-like circles under my eyes (plus a six-week-long cold) is a non-fiction book project I've been researching for months. I'm in the process of conducting dozens of interviews as well as observing an educational process (more details on this later) three mornings a week. We're talking EARLY in the morning. In the 6 o'clock hour early. The give me coffee, STAT, kinda early.
Now that we're several weeks into the semester, I'm getting a handle on the teaching and the non-fiction project and am hoping to start blogging more about pop culture and politics, particularly about stuff like this:
Have you seen the
new stills from the next season of
Mad Men? Don and Megan vacationing in Hawaii. The sixth season can't get here fast enough . . . and neither can the resumption of my blogging!
Image credit: AMC via TVLine.
